Tallinn Estonia Quotes

Springs and summers full of song and revolution. The Popular Front, demonstrations and confrontations, time that takes you away from yourself and your poetry, so that you could see them as if from cosmic space, a way of looking that changes everything into stars, our Earth, you and me, Estonia and Eritrea, blue anemones and the Pacific Ocean. Even the belief that you will write more poems. Something that was breathing into you, as May wind blows into a house bringing smells of mown grass and dogs' barks, - this something has dissipated, become invisible like stars in daylight. For quite a time I haven't permitted myself to hope it would come back. I know I am not free, I am nothing without this breathing, inspiration, wind that comes through the window. Let God be free, whether he exist or no. And then, it comes once again. At dusk in the countryside when I go to an outhouse, a little white moth flies out of the door. That's it, now. And the dusk around me begins little by little to breathe in words and syllables. * In the morning, I was presented to President Mitterrand, in the evening, I was weeding nettles from under the currant bushes. A lot happened inbetween, the ride from Tallinn to Tartu and to our country home through the spring that we had waited for so long, and that came, as always, unexpectedly, changing serious greyish Estonia at once into a primary school child's drawing in pale green, into a play-landscape where mayflies, mayors and cars are all somewhat tiny and ridiculous... In the evening I saw the full moon rising above the alder grove. Two bats circled over the courtyard. The President's hand was soft and warm. As were his eyes, where fatigue was, in a curious way, mingled with force, and depth with banality. He had bottomless night eyes with something mysterious in them like the paths of moles underground or the places where bats hibernate and sleep.

By 2006, they had created an international exemplar of interconnectedness. Estonian software engineers had not only created Skype; they were helping to build a new society, where the only rituals requiring you to show up in person and present a document were marriage, divorce, and buying property. Everything else was online—government, banking, finance, insurance, communications, broadcast and print media, the balloting for elections. Wi-Fi was strong, ever present, and free. People began to call their homeland e-Estonia. They had created the first country whose political and social architectures were framed by an internet infrastructure—and perhaps the most technologically sophisticated nation on earth. In April 2007, the authorities in Tallinn decided to move the Bronze Soldier from its pedestal to a military cemetery. Estonian patriots found it offensive, Russian nationalists came to Estonia to rally around it, and the statue became a flash point of confrontation. Russia’s foreign affairs minister, Sergey Lavrov, called the decision disgusting; he warned of serious consequences for Estonia. An angry mob of Russians ran riot in the capital. In Moscow, young thugs laid siege to the Estonian embassy and forced it to shut down. And then Putin waged political warfare in a way that made Estonia’s strength its weakness.

On August 23, 1989, more than two million Baltic citizens created a human chain that spanned more than four thousand miles, from Vilnius in southern Lithuanian to Tallinn in northern Estonia, and linked the three capital cities. I